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On April 22, 1793, President George Washington issued a Proclamation of Neutrality in the war that had just been declared between France and Britain. The United States, Washington decreed, “should with sincerity and good faith adopt and pursue a conduct friendly and impartial toward the belligerent Powers.” Washington’s action raised a question: Where did the President get off declaring the country’s neutrality? After all, the Constitution, which had been written merely six years earlier, entrusted to Congress the power to declare war. Didn’t Washington’s actions infringe on that authority? The dispute generated an exchange over the proper scope of Presidential power, conducted in the pages of a Philadelphia newspaper, between Alexander Hamilton and James Madison. Hamilton, writing as Pacificus, reaffirmed his typically muscular reading of executive authority. A “correct and well informed mind will discern at once,” he asserted, that such discretion “of course must belong to the Executive.” After all, he continued, “The general doctrine then of our constitution is, that the Executive Power of the Nation is vested in the President; subject only to the exceptions and qu[a]lifications which are expressed in the instrument.”

Madison pushed back, under the pen name Helvidius, after the Roman statesman who argued that the emperor should act only with the consent of the Senate. His concern extended beyond the precise question of the neutrality proclamation; Madison offered a more general admonition against bestowing war powers on a single, potentially flawed individual. “In no part of the constitution is more wisdom to be found than in the clause which confides the question of war or peace to the legislature, and not to the executive department,” Madison, the primary author of the document, observed. Were that decision placed in the hands of the executive, he warned, “the trust and the temptation would be too great for any one man”—not, perhaps, “the prodigy of many centuries” but a more imperfect leader, “such as may be expected in the ordinary successions of magistracy.” The reason, Madison said, was clear: “War is in fact the true nurse of executive aggrandizement. . . . In war the public treasures are to be unlocked, and it is the executive hand which is to dispense them. In war the honors and emoluments of office are to be multiplied; and it is the executive patronage under which they are to be enjoyed. It is in war, finally, that laurels are to be gathered, and it is the executive brow they are to encircle. The strongest passions, and most dangerous weaknesses of the human breast; ambition, avarice, vanity, the honorable or venial love of fame, are all in conspiracy against the desire and duty of peace.”

To read those words today, in light of President Donald Trump’s war against Iran, is to shudder. First, of course, at Madison’s prescience: like the other Founders, he grasped the frailty of human nature and the consequent imperative of checks and balances. Second, however, at the chasm between the Framers’ conceptions of Presidential war power and the unbounded nature of that authority today. Even Hamilton took it as a given that the decision about whether to go to war was wisely lodged in Congress, as the Constitution had provided. “If the Legislature have a right to make war on the one hand—it is on the other the duty of the Executive to preserve Peace till war is declared,” he wrote. Hamilton and Madison would have been aligned in horrified opposition had Washington, without congressional action, dispatched gunboats to sink British ships.

But here we are, in a world of congressional atrophy and seemingly unlimited Presidential war-making power. This lopsided situation is not solely of Trump’s making. Congress has not formally declared war since the Second World War, as the executive branch, under Presidents of both parties, has asserted ever-increasing authority to engage in the unilateral use of military force. Since that time, congressional acquiescence has generally taken the form of an authorization for the use of military force—when it has happened at all. To a certain extent, this is a logical and necessary outgrowth of technological innovations, and of the need for speed and flexibility in an age of nuclear weapons and global terrorism. The congressional power to declare war, like the rest of the Constitution, is not, to paraphrase Justice Robert Jackson, a suicide pact. Indeed, the Framers recognized these imperatives, along with the tension inherent between congressional authority and the President’s role as Commander-in-Chief. At the Constitutional Convention, they rewrote the draft language of the document, which originally assigned Congress the power to “make war.” According to Madison’s notes, “make” was changed to “declare,” “leaving to the Executive the power to repel sudden attacks.”

Decade after decade, the modern Congress has allowed its authority to be eroded, with only tiny and largely ineffective peeps of protest. In 1989, after the Panamanian General Manuel Noriega refused to honor election results, President George H. W. Bush ordered thousands of troops to Panama to, among other things, capture Noriega to stand trial for drug trafficking in the United States. In 1999, President Bill Clinton instituted an air campaign, joined by NATO allies, to stop ethnic cleansing in Kosovo; the operation continued beyond the sixty-day deadline to obtain congressional approval for introducing U.S. troops into hostilities imposed by the 1973 War Powers Resolution. In 2011, President Barack Obama launched missile attacks against military sites in Libya; Obama called the action “a limited and well-defined mission in support of international efforts to protect civilians and prevent a humanitarian disaster.” During Trump’s first term, he conducted air strikes against a Syrian airfield in 2017, and again in 2018 on chemical-weapons facilities, the second time joined by the United Kingdom and France. In 2021, President Joe Biden, invoking his constitutional authority as Commander-in-Chief, ordered “defensive” air strikes against Iranian-backed militias in Iraq and Syria.

These actions were typically abetted by legal opinions issued by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel; each opinion built on its predecessor to justify increasingly elastic interpretations of Presidential power. Jack Goldsmith, a Harvard law professor and a head of that office under President George W. Bush, has observed that the O.L.C. opinions on Presidential use of force “are famously promiscuously permissive.” The first part of O.L.C.’s analysis is whether the planned military activity furthers a “sufficiently important national interest.” Somehow, it always does. The second part is whether the “nature, scope and duration” of the expected use of force rises to the level of “ ‘war’ in a constitutional sense.” Somehow, it never does.

In considering whether military action amounts to a war, the O.L.C.’s lawyers examine factors such as whether there will be ground troops, the likely number of casualties, the scope of the mission (for instance, targeted strikes versus regime change), and the risk of escalation. As a report by the Congressional Research Service summarized, “The executive branch has never publicly concluded that a military operation crossed the threshold into an unconstitutional war, but it has opined that a variety of military operations do not reach this level. For example, O.L.C. concluded that deployments of 20,000 ground forces, a two-week air campaign including 2,300 combat missions, and an air campaign involving over 600 missiles and precision-guided munitions did not amount to wars in the constitutional sense.” Adding insult to congressional injury, “even when Congress enacted authorizations for use of military force—including in the Vietnam War, Persian Gulf War of 1991, post-September 11 conflict of Afghanistan, and the 2003 Iraq War—each Presidential Administration claimed that they possessed independent constitutional authority to engage in those conflicts even if Congress had not authorized them.” When Trump, in 2020, ordered the targeted killing of the Iranian general Qasem Soleimani while Soleimani was on a trip to Baghdad, the O.L.C. stretched the 2002 Authorization for Use of Military Force in Iraq to justify the killing of the Iranian leader. The O.L.C.’s interpretations are also, for the most part, unchallengeable. Since at least the war in Vietnam, courts have refused to referee disputes between the President and Congress over war powers.

In other words, Trump took office for the second time with few significant constraints on his power to deploy the military. Then, typically, he blew through whatever limits remained. The first strike on Iran, in June, 2025, stretched the limits of his authority because of the risk it posed of setting off a regional conflict. The January, 2026, operation to seize the Venezuelan President, Nicolás Maduro, pressed the limits even further; the closest analogy is the George H. W. Bush Administration’s capture of Noriega, but, in that case, Panama’s Defense Forces had killed a U.S. marine, and its National Assembly had declared a state of war with the United States. The current war with Iran—as Trump himself has described it—represents an even greater leap into a realm of unchecked Presidential power. If there is any practical restraint on unilateral Presidential action, it is hard to discern. The Framers would have found this chilling.

I spoke about the Iran war recently with Tess Bridgeman, who was a deputy legal adviser to the National Security Council during the Obama Administration; she is now a senior fellow and visiting scholar at N.Y.U. Law School’s Reiss Center on Law and Security and co-editor-in-chief of the website Just Security. Bridgeman told me that, prior to the Trump Administration, “this would have been one of the paradigmatic cases of, Of course you have to go to Congress.” Under previous Presidents, she said, “the separation of powers has been eroded. This is it being eviscerated.”

The War Powers Resolution of 1973 states that, within forty-eight hours of troops being introduced into hostilities, the President must inform Congress. The Trump Administration did so on Monday, asserting that the “strikes were undertaken to protect United States forces in the region, protect the United States homeland, advance vital United States national interests . . . and in collective self-defense of our regional allies, including Israel.” The law gives Congress the ability—in theory, anyway—to halt military action. In practice, this is doomed to failure in the current Congress; any resolution would have to survive an almost certain Presidential veto. Still, Congress taking a vote is important as a matter of symbolism and, not incidentally, politics. As Senator Tim Kaine, a Democrat who has been a stalwart defender of congressional prerogatives, put it, “Nobody gets to hide and give the President an easy pass or an end run around the Constitution. Everybody’s got to declare whether they’re for this war or against it.” In an effort to stop military action in Iran, Kaine, alongside the Republican senator Rand Paul, put forward a new war-powers resolution that has not been approved by Congress; it failed in the Senate on Wednesday, by a vote of 47–53; the House is expected to take up a similar measure on Thursday, with the same outcome expected.

In the meantime, the war shows every sign of widening. On Tuesday, a U.S. submarine torpedoed an Iranian warship near Sri Lanka, more than two thousand miles from Iran; Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth said that it was the first such action since the Second World War. Hegseth vowed “death and destruction from the sky all day long” and said that the conflict had “only just begun.” If this is not “war in a constitutional sense,” nothing is. ♦

Like “Lolita,” the new campus comedy “Vladimir” takes its title from the object of its protagonist’s delusional obsession. The series’ Vladimir, played by Leo Woodall, is a rising literary star and a young father who’s just arrived at a sleepy upstate college, where he and his wife are set to teach. More relevant to his new colleague, M (Rachel Weisz), a creative-writing professor, he is also fantastically hard-bodied, as dedicated to his gains at the gym as he is to the life of the mind. M’s infatuation with Vladimir might be interpreted as an idle distraction from the sex scandal engulfing her husband, John (John Slattery), if not for a flash-forward in the show’s opening minutes. There she is with an unconscious man tied to a chair in her cabin, part-Humbert Humbert, part-Annie Wilkes.

The initial scene inspires little faith. M looks into the camera and addresses the viewer directly, bemoaning the woes of middle age. Her adult daughter no longer needs her. Her students find her lectures passé. Worst of all, she may never again provoke a “spontaneous erection” since, “as an older woman—truly, what is more embarrassing—I will have lost the ability to captivate.” Coming from someone who looks like Rachel Weisz, one of the most gorgeous women alive, such sentiments are a little hard to swallow. Being taken into M’s confidence feels like being cornered at a party by the least self-aware person in the room. Later, she remarks that the scope of her Women in American Fiction class is “a bit broad,” then adds, lest we miss her brilliant wit, “that was a pun.”

Despite this unpromising start, “Vladimir”—adapted from the 2022 novel of the same name by its author, Julia May Jonas, and the showrunner Kate Robin—proves strangely compelling. Even when we think we know where the series is going, it remains as slippery as its unreliable narrator, difficult to nail down in both genre and intent. Much of the early fun lies in the gap between how M thinks she comes across and how she actually does. In the pilot, she crows about the harvest salad she brings to a faculty retreat—a “real fuck-you salad,” she intimates to us, “the kind that makes everyone a bit embarrassed about what they brought.” It’s beautiful, but it goes untouched. When her “best and favorite” student opts to take a course with Vladimir’s wife, Cynthia (Jessica Henwick), in lieu of M’s own, she assures the girl that Women in American Fiction is oversubscribed anyway. The numbers say otherwise.

“Vladimir” is about as invested in the mores of the university as “The Morning Show” is in the mechanics of the newsroom. The adaptation retains traces of its literary roots—there are multiple nods to Nabokov, including a bakery named after Charlotte Haze, Lolita’s mother—but its bookishness is mostly window dressing. The show’s depiction of the ivory tower is full of improbable dramas: one subplot involves a texted request for a letter of recommendation sent at 11 P.M. and fulfilled within the hour. M struggles with an unshakable case of writer’s block that set in fifteen years ago, after the publication of her acclaimed first novel. Vladimir, who’s working on his sophomore effort, is more dismayed than soothed when she says of tenure, “Once you get it, you never have to go anywhere else.”

M isn’t just a creature of the academy, but its happy captive. While her husband charms their daughter and her partner by holding forth on the Kardashians as the Greek tragedies of our times, M would probably be content forever teaching “Rebecca”—a text that one of her students declares unrelatable because it features “a mousy-ass woman married to a toxic man.” (To her credit, M mounts a persuasive defense of the book’s universality as a story about “the inescapable pull of your lover’s lover.”) Her fear that her professional irrelevance has come too soon—an anxiety not often explored in Hollywood’s midlife-crisis narratives—is unexpectedly affecting.

That feeling of obsolescence comes to a head when a half-dozen former students lodge complaints of inappropriate behavior against John. M’s adoring acolytes reassure her that she doesn’t “have to do the whole supportive-wife thing”—but, once she declines to distance herself from him, she begins to be seen as complicit herself. The series is largely sympathetic to M’s nostalgia for an era when affairs between teachers and students were “fun not despite the power dynamic, but because of the power dynamic,” and her pupils are believably overbearing in their certainty that rigid moral frameworks can be applied to any relationship. They also exhibit a boner-killing tendency to label every impulse with hyper-specific jargon; one boy asks for an extension on a paper because he was busy coming out as “gynesexual,” or attracted to femininity in any gender. (M would prefer not to overanalyze pleasure: she and John have enjoyed what she calls “an open marriage, but without all the awful communication.”) While she decries the way today’s young women seem to deny their own sexual agency, she’s desperate to assert her own. When Vladimir confesses that he and his wife have had a fight, she looks downright hopeful as she asks, “About me?”

The series follows M down this rabbit hole, less interested in relitigating the #MeToo movement than in showing what happens when a woman’s lust becomes an imperfect vehicle for self-renewal. At first, it’s easier to fantasize about Vladimir in hackneyed, uncomplicated erotic scenarios than to confront her domestic reality, which bristles with decades of pent-up resentments. But when Vladimir divulges Cynthia’s history of depression or overburdens her with child care, you start to wonder if M just has a thing for assholes. At least John—who strongly recalls Roger Sterling, Slattery’s “Mad Men” character—boasts a roguish charisma; Vladimir is such a drip that even his wife muses aloud that he could benefit from the life experience of having an affair.

That Vladimir never deserves M’s admiration is beside the point. It’s desire itself that resuscitates her, even when wanting someone so badly makes humiliation unavoidable. M inadvertently drops hints that she thinks about Vladimir constantly; when he texts her an emoji, she has to ask her daughter what it means. But he’s less important as a lover than as a muse. After meeting him, M begins to write again—though, because the show seldom shies from absurdity, she pens the entire manuscript by hand, filling dozens of legal pads. Fittingly, she takes them to bed: in the end, she’s most intoxicated by her own thoughts. ♦

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On this episode of Critics at Large, with the ninety-eighth Academy Awards just around the corner, Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry, and Alexandra Schwartz are joined by their fellow staff writer Michael Schulman to take stock of Oscars season. They discuss the biggest races and consider whether the year’s Best Picture nominees—many of them both critical and commercial successes—might represent a return to the bygone era of “grownup movies.” At the center of all this pageantry is the host: a notoriously tricky role for even the most seasoned performers. Together, the critics revisit the highs and lows of Oscars hosting history, from the long tenure of Bob Hope to the golden age of Billy Crystal. These m.c.s’ success hinges on their ability to walk a fine line, embodying the celebratory spirit of the evening while also poking fun at its absurdity. “It’s about that insider-outsider aspect. You are the court jester,” Schwartz says. “Are you really wanting to be vizier to the king, or are you O.K. in that jester role?”

Read, watch, and listen with the critics:

“Oscar Wars,” by Michael Schulman
“Marty Supreme” (2025)
“Sinners (2025)
“The Secret Agent” (2025)
“One Battle After Another” (2025)
“‘Come to Brazil?’ The Oscars Just Might,” by Michael Schulman (The New Yorker)
“Sentimental Value” (2025)
“The Mastermind” (2025)
“Peter Hujar’s Day” (2025)
Billy Crystal’s opening monologue for the 1990 Oscars
Chris Rock’s opening monologue for the 2005 Oscars
Ricky Gervais’s opening monologue for the 2020 Golden Globes
Nikki Glaser’s opening monologue for the 2026 Golden Globes

New episodes drop every Thursday. Follow Critics at Large wherever you get your podcasts.

Getting nominated for an Oscar may be great for your career, but it’s not exactly healing. Just ask Wunmi Mosaku, a Best Supporting Actress nominee for “Sinners,” in which she plays Annie, a hoodoo healer whose knowledge of mysticism helps keep vampires at bay. The other day, Mosaku ordered chai at a coffee shop in Flatbush, feeling nauseated from the car ride over. On top of the exhaustion from the campaign trail—she was wearing a powder-pink trenchcoat and pants, chosen for a morning taping of “The Kelly Clarkson Show”—she is pregnant with her second child, a fact that she revealed on the red carpet of the Golden Globes.

Before “Sinners,” Mosaku said, “I knew nothing about hoodoo. All I had ever heard of was voodoo and that it was a scary, bad, evil thing. Then, when I was doing my research for hoodoo, I learned it was connected to Ifá, which is the traditional Yoruba spirituality system.” When she was a baby, her parents moved from Nigeria to Manchester to get Ph.D.s—her father in architecture, her mother in chemistry—and they raised her as a Christian. “Ifá was something I was told to stay away from,” Mosaku said. But her father grew herbs in his garden. “I now realize that he uses traditional medicines. I always thought he was a bit woo-woo—like, ‘Just take a Tylenol, Dad!’ That knowledge is still in the culture.”

To play Annie, Mosaku consulted with a hoodoo priestess, who showed her how to bless the mojo bag worn by Smoke (Michael B. Jordan) in the film. As a child, Mosaku felt orphaned from her Nigerian roots; her favorite film was “Annie,” which she’d watch over and over. As a teen-ager, she realized that acting was her calling. Albert Finney, who played Daddy Warbucks, had gone from Manchester to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, so Mosaku went there, too. In 2020, as she was “grappling with what was happening racially across the globe and how much I had tried so hard to assimilate,” her husband gave her a gift of a Yoruba class at U.C.L.A. She’s been taking private lessons ever since. “Yoruba is a tonal language, so I get the tones wrong a lot,” she said. At the Globes, she wore a yellow dress, a reference to the Yoruba proverb “Iya ni wura,” or “Mother is gold.”

But the pregnancy and the awards-season grind had left her feeling less than golden. In Flatbush, Mosaku visited Sacred Vibes Apothecary, where she had arranged to meet the shop’s master herbalist, Karen Rose. Rose, a bubbly Guyanese woman, opened the store in 2009 and teaches classes online. One of her students, a Buddhist lama, had just conducted a workshop on the medicine of “Sinners,” with guidance on how to “get rid of energetic vampires,” Rose said. “Every herbalist’s favorite part of that movie was the apothecary scene,” she told Mosaku. “All of our houses look like that!”

Rose stood at a counter in front of an antique mirror draped with lavender bunches; around her were fragrant shelves of teas, tinctures, elixirs, and anointed candles. “I teach Western herbalism, but I concentrate heavily on plants that I grew up with—hibiscus, ginger, thyme,” she explained. Mosaku said that she loves hibiscus tea, but that Google had warned against drinking it while pregnant. “You can,” Rose assured her. “This is why ancestral medicine is so important. Hibiscus is really good for building your blood and preventing preeclampsia.”

“That’s what I thought!” Mosaku said, banging the counter.

Rose recommended ginger and cinnamon, for morning sickness, and lemon balm, for postpartum depression. She also had candles called Black Madonna (for a safe delivery) and Success (for Mosaku’s new batik maternity line). Anything for awards-season stress? “I would say nervous-system support with lemon balm and then an energetic shield—astragalus,” Rose advised. She showed Mosaku a home-blessing kit. “Every time you open your door, it’s a different kind of energy, even if it’s delivery people. So I’m really protective of the home.”

Mosaku agreed. “A woman I follow online—she’s from Louisiana and a spiritualist—says not to put a welcome mat outside your door.” This is more or less the moral of “Sinners”: don’t invite the vampires in.

Rose asked her son, Zion, to pull down jars of lavender, chamomile, and hops, to mix a bath blend for Mosaku’s two-year-old daughter, who has had trouble sleeping. They stirred it in a steel bowl before ringing it up, along with the candles, a tea called Calm Your Nerves, one of everything from Rose’s pregnancy line, and, for Mosaku’s husband, a men’s longevity tonic called Zeus Juice. Mosaku vowed to sign up for Rose’s next online class. “Thank you so much for reconnecting me to the joy and the purpose I felt playing Annie,” she told Rose, giddily. “I have been, like, ‘I want to get back! I want to get back!’ But I haven’t known how.” ♦

If you never have to explain yourself, you can’t really ever be wrong. In recent decades, few things have been as famously wrong as the political theatre surrounding the Iraq War: Colin Powell showing his satellite images in front of the U.N. Security Council and repeating the phrase “weapons of mass destruction,” Donald Rumsfeld’s word puzzles about known unknowns and the absence of evidence not being the evidence of absence, George W. Bush’s triumphant “Mission Accomplished” episode aboard the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln. These displays worked in the moment; support for the Iraq War was much higher among the public than some might remember now, and the media mostly filed in the back of the Administration’s dance line. They have since become synonymous not only with a loss of faith in the government’s duty to put American lives over profit but, perhaps more enduringly, with the end of the country’s trust in the media.

The Trump Administration, in contrast, has, in its own approach to war, simply skipped the explaining phase. This makes sense in a perverse way. You can consider the past half century of American military adventures as a continuum where the lessons of Vietnam—the first televised war, which delivered intimate footage of American draftees fighting in the jungle—instructed Desert Storm (a brief conflict, represented on TV largely by faraway shots of Patriot missiles), which, in turn, influenced the spectacle around Afghanistan and Iraq (wars of regime change, accompanied by images of liberation). It follows that, for our latest incursion into the Middle East, the Administration in charge would do away with the alleged moral imperatives and grand imagery of the previous wars and move straight to the bombs. The sight of a high-ranking official making his case in front of the U.N. Security Council now feels quaint and almost comical. Patriotism, apparently, is something you talk about during the Olympics and maybe during halftime at the Super Bowl but something you need not invoke when putting troops in the line of fire.

To date, the only explanations offered by the Administration have been confusing more than anything else. “We didn’t start this war,” the Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, said at a press conference on Monday, pointing out that President Trump, Marco Rubio, Jared Kushner, and the special envoy Steve Witkoff—evidently, the Iran negotiating team—had “bent over backwards for real diplomacy.” He also said that Iran had a “conventional gun to our head,” reiterating that America had no choice but to go on the offensive.

But he also struck a tone of nihilistic defiance. “No stupid rules of engagement, no nation-building quagmire, no democracy-building exercise, no politically correct wars,” Hegseth said. “We fight to win, and we don’t waste time or lives.” In other words, all the old patriotic and moral justifications for our forever wars no longer applied. We just do it because we want to “win,” even if we can’t really tell you what we’re winning. On Wednesday, Hegseth fired up the cliché factory again, saying, “Death and destruction from the sky all day long. We’re playing for keeps.” If you don’t like that, well, then, Hegseth and the Trump Administration are telling you that they don’t care.

Last year, when writing about how the public would remember the war in Gaza, I asked what happens “when every image becomes a site of contestation; when the rare sights we all see together, whether joyous or devastating, quickly fray into thousands, even millions, of threads, each with their own grip on reality”? In the two years that I’ve been writing this column, I’ve asked some variation of this question on several occasions, because I still don’t really know whether the internet as we now experience it—constantly, on our phones—has made it impossible for any narrative to stick with the public, and whether this, in turn, makes it impossible to tell any story that might inspire abiding dissent.

Like so many brooding young men of my generation, I was quite taken, when I was in high school, by the novels of Milan Kundera. At the time, my interest was divided between trying to understand totalitarianism and horniness, but one passage in particular from “The Book of Laughter and Forgetting” stuck with me and seems relevant today: “The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” These days, we forget because there’s too much to try to remember, and because we can’t tell what’s worth holding on to and what’s online trash. On Tuesday night, the U.S. Southern Command announced that it had launched joint operations with Ecuador against “Designated Terrorist Organizations.” Meanwhile, the list of elected officials who have made conflicting or meaningless statements about Iran keeps growing, and now includes Chuck Schumer, who said, “No one wants an endless war but we certainly don’t want a nuclear Iran,” a statement so noncommittal, gnarled, and koan-y that it sounds like it was written by history’s most frustrating Buddhist monk. (On Wednesday, Schumer, making the case for a war-powers resolution, said, “Americans overwhelmingly oppose war with Iran. And Senate Republicans have a duty to stand up for Americans by forcing Donald Trump to reverse course.”) We are aware that stuff is happening that we should care about, but the fog of bullshit surrounding this stuff is so thick that we can barely make out its shape or heft. Less than six weeks have passed since Alex Pretti was shot dead by C.B.P. agents in Minneapolis, and yet that, too, already feels like yesterday’s problem.

This doesn’t mean that we can’t remember anything. Whatever resistance does form against our new war in the Middle East won’t come out of deep knowledge of the conflict or even disagreements over its justifications—when none are offered, how can we argue against them?—but, rather, out of the collective memory of Afghanistan and Iraq. The Trump Administration is making a bet that this remembering will be obscured by all the news and trash we take in every day. And, as long as American boots do not hit the ground in Iran—which would take the war from our phones into the family living rooms of the servicepeople who are deployed—Trump might well get away with it.

If we do forget the lessons of Afghanistan and Iraq, it won’t be on account of a revisionist history about those wars, one that has swayed us with jingoistic propaganda about a caring military or some paean about spreading democracy. Instead, Trump will have won by simply refusing to tell a story at all, outside of Hegseth’s absurd football-coach talk. Hegseth, in a way, is right: nobody believes in those stories anymore, so why would he bother spinning them? Just say, essentially, nothing, and hope that, eventually, we’ll all go back to our phones. ♦